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Just two days after jettisoning its last x86-oriented division to Lenovo, IBM has unveiled the first servers based on the new Power8 CPU architecture. Somewhat unusually, IBM’s press release for the new servers directly attacks both Intel’s “closed and proprietary” way of doing business and its products (IBM says Power8-based systems are nearly 20% better on price-performance than x86-based systems). Is IBM all bark and no bite? Or does the Power8 architecture and and OpenPower Foundation (which now has 59 members) actually stand a chance against Intel’s server monopoly? Let’s dive in and take a closer a look.

The new servers

First, the new Power8 servers: There’s the mid-range scale-out S822L and S824L, which can support up to two 12-core Power8 chips each (pictured above), and the high-end Enterprise E870 and E880, which can accommodate up to 8 and 16 Power8 chips respectively. The top-end E880, with its full complement of 16 Power8 chips, has 192 CPU cores — and 16 terabytes of RAM, 32 third-gen PCIe x16 slots, and lots of other goodies. There’s even space for a DVD drive. And don’t forget that each Power8 CPU core has 8-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) — so, on the 16-chip system you actually have up to 1536 concurrent threads.

An IBM Power8 E880 server rack

The S822L and S824L have a trick up their sleeves: They’re both outfitted with a CAPI slot, which is essentially a direct link to the Power8 chip. CAPI is where the OpenPower Foundation enters the equation: Because the CAPI spec is fully open, hardware makers can create a whole host of CAPI-enabled components. For example, Nvidia is designing a Tesla-like GPU coprocessor that can plug straight in, providing even more ridiculous levels of parallelism. Altera is designing CAPI FPGAs that can be programmed for specific Big Data workloads, providing utterly insane speed-ups (on the order of 1,000 times faster than a comparable x86 system). I’m not sure why the E870 and E880 don’t have CAPI capabilities.

For a lot more details on the Power8 architecture, CAPI, and the OpenPower Foundation, read our featured story: IBM unveils Power8 and OpenPower pincer attack on Intel’s x86 server monopoly. The new Power8 servers are available from October 31. Pricing starts at around $8,000 for a single-socket S812L; for a 16-socket system, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, I imagine. (If a single Power8 chip was available for OEMs, it would probably be priced at around $5,000.)

Taking on Intel

The whole point of the Power8 architecture and the OpenPower Foundation is to take down Intel’s dominance of the server market — similar to how AMD and a few others are trying (and failing) to poke a hole in the low-power server market with ARM-based chips. Gartner estimates that Intel provided 92% of all new server chips in 2013 — and IBM, and OpenPower members like Nvidia and Samsung, want a piece of that incredibly lucrative pie. I’m not a business analyst, but such a pincer attack seems like a smart way to go about weakening Intel’s position — and it certainly helps that the Power8 chip is monstrously powerful, and that the OpenPower Foundation has almost every big hardware player except for Intel on its roster.

Intel’s answer to the ARM threat: Bringing 15-core and 18-core Xeon parts down to mainstream servers (EP, as opposed to EX).

It will take a lot to unseat Intel, though. Something in the region of 95% of all servers in the world are powered by Intel-x86 chips — and thus, most of the software and hardware ecosystems are also x86-oriented. Power, Sparc, and other RISC-type chip architectures have been trending towards obsolescence for a long, long time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that IBM — which itself is quite fond of closed, proprietary tech — finally opened the doors on its Power architecture to create the OpenPower Foundation. I don’t think it would be unfair to characterize this as a last-gasp effort.

But hey, if Power8 is really as powerful as IBM says, and if IBM and its OpenPower partners really are serious about bringing to market solutions that can flatten Intel/x86 in terms of performance and performance-per-watt, then maybe this will be one of the few last-gasp efforts that actually pays off. It’ll be an interesting few years, that’s for sure.

Tagged In

Interesting years to come, indeed. Is not healthy to have a single manufacturer providing 92% of all server processors.

winnix

I strongly agree. Competition is always a good thing. The higher any 1 company’s % gets, the higher prices go for us all.

P0l0nium

Yeah , but the competition has to be “competitive” and not simply rely on marketing spin in order to pay this months salaries, keep the lights on and ward off threats of closure from the CEO.

Alex Rubio

What does that have to do with this article?

P0l0nium

It has PLENTY to do with this article and the view expressed by the contributor to whom I replied.

The bulk of the “nascent competition” to X86 in servers is ARM based and the “ARM Server” redux over the past 12 months has gone from “Lower Power” to “Cheaper” to “More Connectivity” to “More Flexible” – At least 3 ARM server initiatives have folded and the rest are struggling to keep the lights on.
As one “wit” on Investorshub put it recenty “The only reason to own an ARM server is “novelty value”.

IBM’s power offerings are in the same boat … La Rometty will kill them like swatting a fly unless they turn a profit. Also they need friends now that they are “fabless” … hence cosying up to the “open” ecosystem with this initiative.

Intel has 95% share of the server market for a reason and that reason is that AMD lost the capacity to compete the moment they lost control of their Fabs.

IBM just lost control of their Fabs – at the moment they are marginally competitive with Intel and then only at the high end.
That will get worse – trust me :-)

AlbiteTwins

:-(

Alex Rubio

students are coming out from school knowing X86 with no knowledge of any other arc . Sure you do have the option to take a one or two coruse, but not a requirement. I chossed too, but not all care.

Rich

Seriously, did Intel pay you for this article?

First of all, it’s important to understand the industry you’re talking about. Start with that.

AMD is not ‘failing’ in the low-power server market with ARM. In order to fail, one would have to try. Seattle isn’t even a real attempt, it’s to seed the market for development, so the infrastructure exists when they have their next releases out. They were pretty clear about that in their discussions, but you’d have to actually listen to them to know that. In any case, that battle hasn’t really started yet, from AMD, but HP appears to just have lobbed over the first salvos.

Next, in case you didn’t learn this yet, ARM is a RISC architecture, and is selling like crazy, so let’s not talk about it being obsolete. POWER is doing fine, because the numbers you present are volume, not in dollar amounts. IBM doesn’t invest in technologies when they lose money.

To say this is a last gasp is completely uninformed, and you really shouldn’t write articles about technology if you believe this. IBM’s mainframes still sell in the billions of dollars, and they borrow a ton of technology from the POWER development. You kill POWER, the cost of development doesn’t go down much, because they still have to do work for the mainframes. Plus, IBM servers do sell well enough, and command a premium over Intel based servers. Most of what isn’t x86 is sold by IBM, and at nice margins.

Opening up POWER makes a lot of sense, however you look at it. The Chinese are particularly interested in this. Also, with so many mobile devices, servers will continue to grow, and compatibility with x86 doesn’t matter so long as the tools are available. IBM has the tools, and then some. If you have POWER based servers, you’re going to want POWER based software, and that can only help IBM. Do they want to make lower margin parts in the POWER ecosystem, that compete with x86 on price? Nope. Do they want those systems out there? Of course. So, why not let partners take that business, while they focus on the big stuff? It’s much better than simply ignoring that segment, as they have done with POWER, and letting it go to x86 or ARM.

It works great for IBM, and it works great for their partners. No one will compete with the POWER 8 on the high-end, the cost is too high, and IBM is not going after the low-end. The software eco-system grows, and IBM’s sales help the lower-end sales when companies need smaller servers, and the partners smaller servers help sell IBM’s bigger stuff when the need for beefier servers comes up. Plus, the software sales, and IBM does sell a lot of middleware.

It’s a great idea, who’s time has come, not a desperation last-gasp effort to save a dying architecture. It’s a very positive development, for a very capable architecture, that is far from dying. Quite the opposite, it’s poised to take quite a bit share in the next few years as things play out.

You seem to mostly agree with all of my points, I think? Except for this: “Next, in case you didn’t learn this yet, ARM is a RISC architecture, and is selling like crazy, so let’s not talk about it being obsolete.”

Can you refer to some analysis/sales figures that show ARM doing well in the server space? Afaik, ARM is hardly moving at all, both in terms of volume and money.

Yes, you are right that Intel is mostly volume, and that IBM/Fujitsu/etc make a fair bit of money from the very-high-end stuff, but even in that space Intel is squeezing the competition out. Look at the chips being used by the most recent supercomputers! Hopefully Power8 can turn the tide at the very-high-end — but the better question is whether they can actually gain overall ground against Intel (and ARM, if they’re doing as well as you say).

Last-Gasp-Effort? I do not understand that comment. Is IBM giving up on power and not planning an 8+ or a 9? I’ve yet to see any news indicating this. Or, does that reference their not handshake-deal with GF to transfer their foundries?

ronch

So it’s x86, ARM and Power. Intel and IBM both have had histories of trying to lock everyone out (ever tried maintaining an IBM server? They made sure you buy no parts from no other but them). Heck, even little ol’ AMD has had tendencies to price real high when they could. ARM, at least up to this point, has shown they’re willing to keep the ISA open and has had no history AFAIK of being too greedy.

These aren’t, as you say in the first paragraph, the first P8 systems – those were the S812 and S822, which came out in May. These new machines are higher-end machines for enterprise customers and specific workloads.

Dozerman

Hopefully, they’ll *stay* open if this is a success, as little as I believe this will happen. One good thing they have going for them is the prevalence of OSS in the server and supercomputer space- easy porting.

Godspeed, IBM. Don’t overdo it.

James Riendeau

The problem with IBM solutions is they are very much of the “in for a penny, in for a pound” variety. You have to buy the whole stack of hardware and services to run IBM. Standardizing on Intel allows an organization to grow organically from a single server to a rack to an entire warehouse full. Then there’s the choice of operating systems, including Windows, which is entrenched in small business. The only reason why Linux is available on Power8 is sysadmins would rather sit on a Dell tech support call to India than deal with the likes of z/OS.

Dozerman

I completely agree and considered commenting on this fact. IBM -assuming that POWER8 could scale all the way down to the consumer level- might be well suited to try producing some POWER8 workstations and legitimately trying to advertise and push them to try and allow a company to have a full hardware and software stack from the bottom up.

Eugen

This title has been sponsored by Intel.

Asdacap Cap

Are there any third party benchmark of this processor? I’m dying to know if it can beat a Xeon E7.

Kira S

There are numbers for SPEC and SAP SD-2. It generally outperforms current E7’s for those loads.

Jim Dawkins

This also comes down to “cost of hardware”…

Dylan Edward

Power architecture brings a slew of possibilities to the table. For decades, you’ve been able to carve up a single frame into multiple logical partitions, assigning various IO cards, RAM, and CPU, and other resources to more or less discrete physical servers inside of a single frame. We’re just starting to see that now in X86 land, with hardware like Cisco’s UCS. It’s different than just regular virtualization, IBM’s hypervisor is built into the hardware. Power scales out better too, in terms of having a single virtual CPU with mondo amounts of resources for workloads that aren’t parallelized amongst many servers. Recently, you CAN scale out x86 as well, but you have to mind limitations with your virtualization software, and it’s more complicated with more layers at play. It’s something IBM has done well for decades, though, and continues to do well.

When you get into the higher class Power systems, redundancy is insane as well, regarding the amount of hardware that could fail before end users would notice.

K.M.

“last gasp” is a pretty funny statement.

EdCoulter

Most servers are running Linux, so the software is not x86 oriented at all. Once you have a kernel running, you can build all the packages from source if you want to or get them from a repository that has binary packages for Arm.